Sitemap for search engines

For basic search engine optimization it's good to have a sitemap.xml file, which contains machine-readable information about all the pages and the structure of your site.

The syntax for such a sitemap.xml file is fairly simple. You can find all about it on http://www.sitemaps.org/.

Because you probably don't want to generate that file by hand, you can create a snippet that indexes your entire site and generates a sitemap.xml for you in a few steps:

Create the snippet with your XML

Create a new snippet with the following content in /site/snippets:

<?= '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>'; ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <?php foreach ($pages as $p): ?>
        <?php if (in_array($p->uri(), $ignore)) continue ?>
        <url>
            <loc><?= html($p->url()) ?></loc>
            <lastmod><?= $p->modified('c', 'date') ?></lastmod>
            <priority><?= ($p->isHomePage()) ? 1 : number_format(0.5 / $p->depth(), 1) ?></priority>
        </url>
    <?php endforeach ?>
</urlset>

Create new routes

In your config.php, create these two new routes:

<?php

return [
  'routes' => [
    [
      'pattern' => 'sitemap.xml',
      'action'  => function() {
          $pages = site()->pages()->index();

          // fetch the pages to ignore from the config settings,
          // if nothing is set, we ignore the error page
          $ignore = kirby()->option('sitemap.ignore', ['error']);

          $content = snippet('sitemap', compact('pages', 'ignore'), true);

          // return response with correct header type
          return new Kirby\Cms\Response($content, 'application/xml');
      }
    ],
    [
      'pattern' => 'sitemap',
      'action'  => function() {
        return go('sitemap.xml', 301);
      }
    ]
  ]
];

You can now visit the sitemap of your Kirby site by browsing http://yourdomain.com/sitemap or http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. The second route redirects to the first.

Excluding pages from your sitemap

You can do that in your config. Here we call the option sitemap.ignore.

return [
  'sitemap.ignore' => ['error'],
];

Automatic Priorities

The sitemap template will automatically try to create priorites for each page, by using the ->depth() attribute. The depth attribute is a simple number, which indicates how deep the page is nested. Main pages have a depth of 1, subpages of main pages have a depth of 2, etc.

The home page will automatically get a priority of 1. You can easily change priorities or remove them entirely if you prefer.

Submitting your sitemap to a search engine

To let your favorite search engines know about your brand-new sitemap, please read the instructions on sitemap.org.

Extending the basic example

This is a very basic example. If you need something more complex, you can either use one of the plugins provided by the community, or extend it yourself, for example, by fine-tuning the options for pages you want to ignore (e.g. filter by template), or adding images.